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Erin Aubry Kaplan

Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?

About a year ago, I decided to build a library on my front lawn. By library, I mean one of

those little free-standing library boxes that dot lawns in bedroom communities around the

country – charming, birdhouse-like structures filled with books that invite neighbors and

passers-by to take a book, or donate a book, or both.

5 I’d spotted the phenomenon on walks through upscale, largely white neighborhoods around

Los Angeles and immediately resolved to bring it home to Inglewood. Why not? A library is

not so much a marker of wealth and whiteness as it is an affirmation of community and cozy,

small-town camaraderie that Inglewood, a mostly Black and Latino city in southwestern Los

Angeles County, has plenty of. We deserved no less.

10 Prepandemic, Inglewood was gentrifying, another reason I’d been inspired to do the library:

I wanted to signal to my longtime neighbors that we had our own ideas about improvement,

and could carry them out in our own way. There are organizations that help people build

these little libraries, but I did mine independently. I envisioned it as a place for my

neighbors to stay connected during the pandemic. The wooden post on which the library

15 sat was a stake in the ground, literally.

The response to the library was slow at first – it was the first in the area, and some people

mistook it for a birdhouse, or a mailbox. But I was pleased to soon see people stopping by

to browse and take home books.

Then one morning, glancing out my front window, I saw a young white couple stopped at

20 the library. Instantly, I was flooded with emotions – astonishment, and then resentment, and

then astonishment at my resentment. It all converged into a silent scream in my head of,

Get off my lawn!

The moment jolted me into realizing some things I’m not especially proud of. I had set out

this library for all who lived here, and even for those who didn’t, in theory. I would not

25 want to restrict anyone from looking at it or taking books, based on race or anything else.

But while I had seen white newcomers to the neighborhood here and there, the truth was,

I hadn’t set it out to appeal to white residents.

Now that they were in front of my house, curious about this new neighborhood attraction,

I didn’t know how to feel. By bringing this modern cultural artifact here from white

30 neighborhoods, had I set myself up, set up the neighborhood? Was I contributing to

gentrification and sending the wrong message about how I wanted the neighborhood to be?

What I resented was not this specific couple. It was their whiteness, and my feelings of

helplessness at not knowing how to maintain the integrity of a Black space that I had

created. I was seeing up close how fragile that space can be, how its meaning can be

35 changed in my mind, even by people who have no conscious intention to change it. That

library was on my lawn, but for that moment it became theirs. I built it and drove it into

the ground because I love books and always have. But I suddenly felt that I could not own

even this, something that was clearly and intimately mine.

As the couple wandered on, no books in hand, I thought about how fragile my feeling of

40 being settled is. It didn’t matter that I own my house, as many of my neighbors do.

Generations of racism, Jim Crow, disinvestment and redlining have meant that we don’t

really control our own spaces. In that moment, I had been overwhelmed by a kind of fear,

one that’s connected to the historical reality of Black people […].

When my uncle, Paul Aubry, bought a house in Los Angeles in the predominantly white,

45 working-class South Central neighborhood of the late 1940s, he wasn’t just buying a house;

he was putting his stake in the ground, making his claim to the American ideal of belonging.

My uncle’s claim was rejected. A cross was burned on his lawn. As more Black families

moved to the neighborhood, white people moved out in droves. The ground shifted under

Uncle Paul’s feet. That white flight forged the chiefly Black and brown South Central of

50 popular imagination and created similar demographics in other city neighborhoods across

the country, including Inglewood.

It has to be said that there’s nothing inherently wrong with the Black-, Latino- and

immigrant-rich neighborhoods that resulted from those flights. Community has always

been our greatest asset, and its greatest source of capital. But now, as younger generations

55 of white people move back to the neighborhoods their parents shunned, in the phenomenon

I call “white return,” it all suddenly feels up for grabs – again. […]

[T]he moment with the couple I saw through my window raised for me a serious moral

question about how I should act. Screaming at them to get off my lawn would be adopting

the values of the oppressor, as my racial-justice activist father used to say. Yet my

60 resentment was not analogous to the white resentment of generations past (and of now,

I’d argue). White resentment has always been legitimized, and reinforced, by legal and

cultural dominance […].

My little library, affirming as it is, is also an illusion; it can’t save our neighborhood. Still,

in 2021, it has become increasingly important to maintain and grow Black space, on its own

65 terms. As I watched the white couple peruse my little library, the most complicated feeling

of all was the brief, bittersweet satisfaction I took in watching them drawn to my lawn, and

to my idea. It felt empowering and hopeful on the one hand, defeating on the other.

So what message do I hope they took from my library? The same message I wanted to send

to the rest of my neighbors, my community: Black presence has value – in every sense of

70 the word, and on its own terms.

Annotations:

· gentrification – process of changing the character of an urban district through wealthier residents and businesses

2 · bedroom communities – a residential area in which a large number of people live but do not work

30 · (to) set someone/something up – here: to do harm to someone/something

41 · Jim Crow – term used for the laws and customs that segregated and demeaned African Americans, primarily from the 1870s to the 1960s

41 · disinvestment and redlining – lack of investment and systematic denial of various services to residents of predominantly non-white areas

1. Outline how Erin Aubry Kaplan plans to make her neighborhood better, as well as the thoughts and experiences she associates with this idea. (Comprehension) (12 Punkte)